Hi! > On 30 Jun 2022, at 14:23, Nikhil Shetty <nikhil.dba04@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi, > > PostgreSQL version - 11.7 > > We are using wal-g for backup/restore. We had a duration of high WAL generation due to application usage due to which archive backup was delayed. > > Backup was started through cron schedule and it didn't complete because it waits for the last WAL to be archived. Now, I know that long running transactions will prevent vacuuming of dead tuples but in this case we were able to run manual vacuums successfully but auto-vacuum never starts. > > As soon as we terminated the long running backup session, the auto-vacuum started kicking in. > > Wanted to understand why a backup operation is blocking the auto-vacuum? > > Wal-g uses non-exclusive backups and waits for the last wal to be archived. As far as I know, WAL-G should not prevent running autovacuums on tables. WAL-G can be run against replication standby, where vacuum is not possible at all, so there must be no conflicts... The only probable problem I can imagine is that we open transaction during pg_stop_backup() [0] to set a statement_timeout. I think this is superflous and unneeded. I think this tx can be safely removed. But anyway, this tx does not have a xid (otherwise it could not run on Standby). BTW which version of WAL-G do you use? Best regards, Andrey Borodin. [0] https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g/blob/8b9b3ca06efb44be4724208dc6f6d11836bd34d9/internal/databases/postgres/queryRunner.go#L243